Wall St slide hits charitable celebrities

SHARING wealth is easier when riches are growing and, after a two-year slump on Wall Street, some of America's celebrity philanthropists are cutting way back. Jane Fonda and Ted Turner no longer share a marriage but they have two things in common - declining finances and tightened pursestrings.

Both have lost bundles on the freefall in AOL Time Warner stock, in which Turner is a major shareholder. Fonda had a sizeable chunk of shares worth an estimated $70m (£42.7m) when she and Turner split in 2001.

Turner says he has lost up to $8bn of his personal wealth and has had to slow payment on the $1bn he promised the United Nations, one of the largest single acts of philanthropy ever.

Fonda, meanwhile, is not just slowing her donations, but even getting some back. Harvard University recently said it would return most of the $6.5m the actress had bequeathed the prestigious learning institution to establish a centre on sex and education. It reportedly could not complete the centre because Fonda was unable to put up the additional $6m she promised, so the university said it would return her original donation rather than leave the job half done. The Boston Globe said Fonda was unhappy with the Harvard's slow handling of her bequest and wanted her money back.

The world's most generous philanthropist, Bill Gates, has lost $10bn of his personal fortune since the stock market peak two years ago, but he was smart enough to divorce his donations from the vagaries of the stock market.

His $24.2bn Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is funded almost entirely from bonds, and no Microsoft stock. Thanks to its conservative investment strategy, the foundation continues to hand out money for education, libraries, global health and community issues in the Pacific Northwest, where Microsoft is based. 'The feeling was we shouldn't get in a position where we would have a hard time meeting our commitments,' said Bill Gates senior, father of the Microsoft founder and director of the foundation.

George Soros, the 72-year-old financier famous for making $1bn betting against sterling, is also continuing to give big, despite declines in his personal wealth. Soros donates half as much to foreign aid programmes as the entire US government and his New York-based foundation is at the forefront of a nationwide move to adopt more progressive criminal justice policies, such as decreasing reliance on prison for non-violent offenders.

As for Harvard, the 83-year-old university has a big enough endowment to survive without Fonda's help.

Other charities in America, especially those that serve the poor, are struggling. Traditional end-of-year appeals for charitable contributions - the lifeblood for grass roots organisations - fell short for many non-profit groups, leaving many facing a bleak 2003. In Buffalo, New York, mail contributions to The American Red Cross were down 52% from a year earlier and the Salvation Army faced a similar decline.

One of America's largest charities - the United Way - is facing funding cuts and lay-offs at centres that serve the disadvantaged across the nation.